Promising Young Woman, The Great Indian Kitchen are both films with simmering feminism and everyday oppression-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Stills from Promising Young Woman and The Great Indian Kitchen

In Promising Young Woman, Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a once-promising medical student who now works as a coffee-shop employee. She is fast approaching 30 but still lives with her parents. Cassie lives a double life. She spends her evenings in clubs, pretending to be black-out drunk to entice, entrap and eventually shame predators. She maintains this lifestyle until she crosses paths with Ryan (Bo Burnham), an old classmate from college. Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for the hit TV show Killing Eve) slowly drip-feeds the specifics of the incident that changed Cassie’s life forever until she herself becomes a cautionary tale.

In the opening scene of writer-director Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, a group of women dance joyously in a studio while an anonymous woman is preparing a smorgasbord of delicious food. A prospective groom (Suraj Venjaramoodu) has come to meet a girl’s (Nimisha Sajayan) family. Once the rituals are completed, the new bride arrives at her in-laws’ house, ready to start her new life. She starts to learn the ways of her new home but having her mother-in-law around means that most of her domestic duties revolve around helping the older woman. Until the mother-in-law leaves because her daughter is expecting. And that is when the bride begins to acutely understand the amount of work she is expected to do. Her father-in-law expects fresh chutney to be ground by hand every morning, and he will not get his own toothbrush or slippers. Everything in the house has to be done by the woman while the men read the newspaper, do yoga or scroll on their phones.

On the surface, these two films are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. 

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman

Fennell’s debut film is designed to subvert assumptions about femininity and the archetypical ‘nice guy.’ Set in Ohio, the aesthetic of this candy-coloured revenge thriller is extra – think Barbie Dream House, while also being subversive. Cassie is blonde, and surrounded by a lot of pink. Everything about ‘daytime’ Cassie is soft and inviting but as soon as the sun sets, she is on the hunt.

There is a recurring shot in The Great Indian Kitchen – hands of women as they cut, cook, grind, wipe, wash, and sweep. Baby liberally peppers the 100-minute run time of the film with these visuals until the viewer begins to feel the drudgery of the endless cycle. The hands do not have faces, and the faces do not have names because this is a story of most households in our society. The film is set in a typical upper-caste ancestral house in Kerala but it could very easily be transplanted to Bihar or Gujarat. The style of filmmaking is very utilitarian. There are no flourishes or distractions. There is no background score either; all you hear is the sounds of women starting their day making tea and breakfast for the men and cleaning the kitchen and performing their nightly conjugal duty at the end.

Dig a little deeper, and you will begin to see how similar the two films are. 

Both films expose the myth of the ‘nice guy.’ These men – they are kind and supportive, treat women with respect, and believe in gender equality – are meant to be an antidote to the patriarchy we all live with. But what if it is not just the ‘bad guy’ who does bad things? Does that not make the ‘nice guy’ a bigger threat because you do not expect it?

In Promising Young Woman, a man is telling Cassie “You’re safe,” while pulling down her panties as she repeatedly tells him to wait. Another tells her that he thinks women are ‘so much more beautiful without make-up’ because lipstick is ‘part of this soul-sucking system meant to oppress women.’ This is just before he grabs the crotch of a really drunk woman. Fennel drives this point by casting actors who have played ‘nice guys’ in the past. Sam Richardson, who played the hilarious Richard Splett on Veep, appears as a guy who believes that women who get too drunk in public are “asking for it.” And, then there is the ultimate ‘nice guy,’ Ryan. He is funny and respectful and Cassie falls under his spell. As they laugh and dance in a montage set to Paris Hilton’s ‘Stars Are Blind,’ for a brief, bright moment, we see a glimpse of a perfect life where she could be happy.

Baby, too, gives us male characters who are not angry or violent. Within the Indian framework, they are ‘nice guys’ – soft spoken, always polite, and non-interfering. But they also impose their will on the women around them without batting an eyelid. It could be something as minor as the father-in-law demanding that the daughter-in-law only cook rice on woodfire and wash his clothes by hand, or more significantly when he very quietly but firmly tells the daughter-in-law that she cannot take a job.

Still from The Great Indian Kitchen

And then there is the husband, someone who kisses his wife goodbye and *gasp* even buys her sanitary pads. During a rare outing, she points out how mindfully he is eating in public whereas at home, she has to clean half-chewed bones and vegetable husks off the table after he is done eating. He is visibly furious but does not lash out. “My house, my convenience,” he tells her. He gives her the silent treatment when they get home, and then demands she apologise. She does because it does not seem like reason enough for a fight.

It is the final act of the two films – where the patriarchal system eventually wins – that really sets them in a league of their own. One of the great advantages of fiction is that you can let your imagination soar. Women can effortlessly overpower the men who have wronged them, or even better, men can really change for the better. But that does not reflect reality, does it? In the real world, there are countless men who have sexually harassed women or worse, who continue to live their normal lives. And patriarchal societies around the world have been around for about 10,000 years.

Things are not going to change in the space of one film. That is the stone-cold reality of a woman’s life and one that even the most realistic storytellers completely ignore.

Not Fennell or Baby, though. 

At the end of Promising Young Woman, Fennell flips the script with the brutal scene where Cassie goes to confront Al, a former classmate, a night before his wedding. Al raped Cassie’s best friend Nina in college, and it was this that completely derailed the lives of two promising young women. She wants him to confess to his crime but he smothers her to death. Eventually, justice is served and Al is arrested. While it is for murder and not rape, we get to feel good that there is one less rapist/murderer hiding in plain sight.

One day, the wife in The Great Indian Kitchen decides that she cannot bear the oppression anymore and just leaves. She understands that no one is going to save her, and that men around her are not going to change, so she does what needs to do to keep her sanity intact. She goes back to dance while he finds himself another wife. As she makes dosas for breakfast, he tells the new wife that his life ‘until now was actually a rehearsal’ and he will ‘rectify those mistakes.’ And then puts down his empty tea cup on the counter, just like he did with the first wife, and walks away.